Happy Birthday

A year ago I came up with the idea of challenging myself to make more hats for my favorite charity Halos of Hope. I had made a few already, and wanted to step up my contribution. I would push myself to make two per month, thinking this was a reasonable goal. I was then inspired by a movie I had just seen, Julie & Julia, and I decided to create this blog to document my progress. Originally I had intended to begin the project in an orderly fashion on January 1st, collecting patterns and planning in the meantime. Obviously I'm not good at waiting since I decided one year ago today to just get on with it. I wasn't going to stop making hats just because I wasn't blogging. Did it really matter when I actually started?  Certainly not to anyone else. So....today, July 5th, is my blogs birthday.

I suppose I should explain that I didn't want to just make two hats, I wanted to use patterns I had never made before. Just a little extra challenge. As a reader I would find it boring to read about the same hat over, and over. Plus there are so many pretty hat patterns why not experience the variety.

Now comes the fun part. In the past year I've used 28 new patterns, some of them requiring me to learn a new stitch or technique. So as far as my goal of using new patterns - check. I've not been the most consistent blogger, especially lately, with a total of 46 blog posts. There have been 2,887 page views (although I don't know how many of those are regular readers) from readers in 10 different countries. And...although I've not blogged about every hat made, my "official" count in my first year is....49. I'm pretty excited about it, especially given my time constraints, arthritis issues, actually making an occasional non-hat project or two, and a few other hats donated to other causes.

What's next? I think I need a bit of break. But I won't stop making hats, I'll just just not make as many...maybe. I've been stashing so much yarn for other projects I need to actually make a few of them. I've also decided Year 2 will be all about children's hats, just to be different. I'm sure I'll still make adult hats, but my new patterns (or most of them), will be focused on all the adorable hat patterns I've been collecting.

Here's to another year. Thanks for visiting.